Via 读 书 学 习, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society a hyperlink-rich empirical analysis of internet filtering in China.:

Having requested some 204,012 distinct web sites, we found more than 50,000 to be inaccessible from at least one point in China on at least one occasion. Adopting a more conservative standard for determining which inaccessible sites were intentionally blocked and which were unreachable solely due to temporary glitches, we find that 18,931 sites were inaccessible from at least two distinct proxy servers within China on at least two distinct days. We conclude that China does indeed block a range of web content beyond that which is sexually explicit. For example, we found blocking of thousands of sites offering information about news, health, education, and entertainment, as well as some 3,284 sites from Taiwan. A look at the list beyond sexually explicit content yields insight into the particular areas the Chinese government appears to find most sensitive.

This report is intended as a milepost, part of an ongoing empirical investigation documenting filtering levels and methods over time. As we continue to collect data on the evolving accessibility of a diversified “basket” of web sites, we will seek to say more about overall trends in Chinese web filtering, and further see if such trends are credibly linked to government statements of Internet policy and, for particular categories of sensitive sites, whether shifts in the Chinese government’s substantive policy (for example, a noted change in tension levels with Taiwan) are reflected in levels of web filtering. This, in turn, can shed light on how important a priority web filtering is to the government.

In other work, the authors will expand analysis to Internet filtering systems in other countries and will generate additional URLs to test based on queries invoked in the local language. Sign up to receive updates. The authors are also developing a distributed application for use by Internet users worldwide in testing, analyzing, and documenting respective Internet filtering regimes. Get more information and sign up to get involved. The authors previously provided access to a web-based system to test web filtering in China which remains available. Finally, the authors prepared documenting the September 2002 redirection of requests for google.com to other search engines.

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